But how, then, does one explain the Bogles, a Texas-Tennessee clan that has been running afoul of the law across multiple generations going back to the Civil War? This one single family, Butterfield discovered, had been responsible for stealing cars and brewing moonshine, burglaries and bombings, manslaughters and murders. Mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers, aunts and uncles all had taken part in the wayward family business.

And Butterfield’s research would reveal that the Bogles weren’t a statistical exception. Multiple studies have shown that only about 5 percent of all families account for fully half of all crime in the United States, and 10 percent account for two out of every three crimes committed here. Could genetics be a determining factor in why people break the law?

That troubling, counter-intuitive question runs through Butterfield’s new book, In My Father’s House: A New View of How Crime Runs in the Family. It also underscored the Zócalo/KCRW “Critical Thinking with Warren Olney” event, titled “Do Americans Misunderstand the Roots of Crime?” at the National Center for the Preservation of Democracy in Little Tokyo in downtown Los Angeles.

In the discussion, moderated by Olney, the venerable host of KCRW’s “To the Point,” Butterfield explained how he’d stumbled onto a family whose members have spent much of their lives shuttling in and out of prisons.

The author, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who covered the waning years of the U.S.-Indochina war before taking up crime reporting, already had written a highly praised book about an African American family that fell into crime, All God’s Children: The Bosket Family and the American Tradition of Violence (1995).

Butterfield had been searching for a white crime family to profile when a friend in Oregon put him in touch with the Bogles, 60 of whose members have served prison time. The patriarch, Rooster Bogle, had spread what his kinfolk called “the family curse” to his own nine offspring and two wives. He would take his kids out with him on crime sprees, from a young age. Occasionally, he would point out the local penitentiary and tell his progeny to take a good look because that’s where they, too, were going to end up later in life.

Being born a Bogle was like being served a guilty verdict in the maternity ward, being handed down a fate through your bloodlines. As one of Rooster’s sons told Butterfield, “What you’re raised with you grow to become. There’s no escape.”

Sensing the packed audience’s growing unease and astonishment at this information, Olney commented, “If you think this sounds like a series from Netflix or HBO, you’re absolutely right.”

Indeed, though the Bogles may have been uneducated and poor, their lore is rich with improbable stories and details that a novelist might shun because they strain credibility. The family forebears got their start brewing up moonshine in a Southern hamlet, then later tried to gain a federal government pension for a relative who claimed to have been a captain in the Union Army. (He wasn’t.)

From what might euphemistically be called white-collar crimes, the family graduated to more serious fare. Rooster and his siblings didn’t go to school, but they did get to meet Bonnie and Clyde and Pretty Boy Floyd, while their parents kept food on the table by working in a traveling carnival and hawking moonshine on the side.

When Rooster turned 16 his entire family took part in a burglary at a local grocery store that netted about $20,000. Although his mother had masterminded the heist, Rooster pleaded guilty when the police came calling, sparing his mother and launching his own long career as a cellblock resident.

Asked by Olney how he’d managed to get these confessional stories, Butterfield replied that some family members had been reluctant at first, but eventually cooperated because they’d actually read Butterfield’s earlier book, and somehow reckoned that he might turn the Bogle family into celebrities if he wrote about them.

Butterfield was able to validate much of what the Bogles told him through police and court reports. He also encountered a judge in Salem, Oregon who over time had had four generations of Bogles appear before his bench. “It was a family value being passed down,” Butterfield said. “When we talk about family values being passed down, we usually mean good family values, but they can be rotten family values, too.”

The same judge told Butterfield that he’d dealt with four other families that spanned four generations of criminals. From that experience, the judge had concluded that simply locking people up doesn’t work; criminal family members needed to be separated, the judge reasoned.

But asserting that crime may be caused, even partially, by genetics, can be a controversial and, some experts would argue, a racist and discriminatory claim. Such genetically based arguments have lost favor over the decades because of their association with 19th-century junk science, and with the Nazis’ criminal experiments in the concentration camps. Civil rights and African American organizations also have strongly challenged and criticized the idea that genetics—rather than institutionalized racism and social inequality—could account for the disproportionate number of incarcerated men of color, said Butterfield, who added pointedly that white Americans still commit the majority of crimes. “People tend to forget that,” he said.

And yet the grim destiny of the Bogle family may indicate that criminal behavior can get programmed into certain groups of people. Although one Bogle female acquired religion and managed to shake free of her home, Butterfield said, “It’s not easy making it out of there. She made it out, but her younger sister didn’t.”

So what, Olney asked, is the way to solve this?

Butterfield said that we need better ways to get information about peoples’ family histories of incarceration—not in order to stigmatize the family, but so as to get them help. In the same way that doctors ask patients about their families’ medical histories of diabetes and high blood pressure, we should be asking people who commit crimes about their family’s criminal records.

One outcome of gathering such useful information is that a judge then would be able to give the family of a troubled kid the option of having what’s called a “multi-systemic therapy” team of therapists, social workers, and other medical professionals who actually move into the family home. Living at close quarters allows the team to closely observe and monitor the family, analyze how it works, and turn its younger members toward better role models. Such teams of professionals have treated thousands of families and are showing “pretty good results,” Butterfield said. But these studies still are in their infancy, he added.

Another approach is to move criminals away from the communities where their bad behavior took root. Butterfield said the power of moving was observed in the case of Louisiana state prisoners from New Orleans who relocated to Texas after Hurricane Katrina wreaked havoc on the Crescent City in 2005. Setting down roots in a new state broke the criminals’ social networks, giving them a better shot at starting over fresh.

This is important because people who spend a lot of time in jails and prisons become institutionalized to living there. Butterfield said he has seen fathers and sons, and mothers and daughters, who share the same prison cell, an arrangement that reinforces anti-social behaviors and leaves people more dependent on their blood relatives and less able to cope when they’re released back into society.

Fielding questions from the audience, Butterfield was asked if he knew of any studies of crime rates in Australia, some of whose early immigrant population comprised inmates banished by the British to the Empire’s farthest reaches. Given that background, one might expect Oz to have high crime rates, the questioner said. Butterfield replied that he couldn’t speak specifically to Australia’s case, but said that the United States has had very high violent crime rates since the 18th century, especially homicides.

Another audience member asked how the relatively small budgets for rehabilitation contribute to recidivism among criminals, including criminal families. Butterfield agreed that prisons spend most of their funds on housing and guards, and suggested that more money could be better spent on programs like court-ordered multi-systemic family therapy.

Ultimately, nature and nurture work together and complement each other, Butterfield said, assigning some people normal lives, and others lives of violence, punishment, and isolation. “I don’t think you can separate the two,” he said.

The post Can Criminals Be Genetically Determined? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

But the inverse can also be true. When members of insular nuclear families lose understanding and empathy for those unlike them, the family can threaten liberal democracy itself.

This threat intensifies when citizens feel left behind, economically or otherwise. When a family’s own economic survival appears to hang in the balance, voters can ignore the interests or rights of groups of others —for example Muslims or undocumented immigrants. Such a response undermines democracy, since democratic decision-making functions best when we can take the larger view of what is good for all citizens—including those unlike us.

Democracy requires a meeting place where people can share ideas, interact with those different from them, and—at least—not demonize them. This serves a few purposes. The better we understand the concerns and anxieties of those unlike us, the more we can empathize, and be persuaded to compromise or consider their good. This directly contributes to stability, since we are more likely to maintain our commitment to democratic institutions, and to uphold the rights of all, if we have some trust and empathy for our fellow citizens, especially those we aren’t related to, or don’t know personally.

Marxist theory co-founder Friedrich Engels saw the private family as foundational to capitalism, making possible the intergenerational transfer of wealth from biological father to son. The nuclear family also enables caring about one’s own to the exclusion of others, because focusing on the success of “one’s own” conceptually depends on marking off “one’s own” from others.

The nuclear family configuration idealized in America today, which draws sharp dividing lines between people, is historically atypical. Throughout human history, we lived in extended kin groups, working together in larger family configurations. Today as we enter our “single-family” homes through our garages without meeting our neighbors, it’s no wonder we’re grappling with an epidemic of loneliness. Working families are struggling to provide childcare, to pay bills, and to have time with each other. The greater distances workers must travel each day for gainful employment further isolates families.

In a society where people face so many pressures and have long experienced stagnant incomes, it’s only human to turn the focus inward. Anxiety about providing for our own family naturally overshadows concern about others when success seems to be a zero-sum game.

To surmount isolation, democratic theorists have stressed the importance of public schools, in which children from diverse backgrounds mingle, laying a foundation for respect and tolerance for fellow citizens. Public universities too can serve this process, when students learn from peers with different experiences.

But we have no infrastructure for a vibrant civil society in which adults interact with peers from different backgrounds—different religions, races and ethnicities, social and economic classes, and educational backgrounds—to discuss issues of political importance. And that is distressing, when finding a way to bring disparate groups together seems especially urgent with regard to both racial tolerance and economic inequality.

Notions of family, are, of course, deeply intertwined with race—whatever race is. Tellingly, Derek Black—who defected from Stormfront, the Internet’s first and largest white nationalist site, founded by his father—wrote in the New York Times that he’d viewed white nationalism as defending the interests of his “white friends and family.” Of course, some families cross-racial boundaries; but when families are racially homogenous, their separation allows members to be ignorant of challenges faced by others.

The nuclear family contributes to economic inequality in two ways. First, by the so-called “marriage gap ” between lower-income people, who are less likely to marry, and higher earners in the U.S., who are more likely to marry each other, further consolidating wealth. Secondly, a family’s ability to provide a strong start for its children is directly tied to economic advantage. If, as studies suggest, an activity as simple as parents reading to their children can increase their life chances, consider the long-term effects of parents’ ability to provide a stable home, decent food, and quality healthcare.

Political philosophers have long recognized that the nuclear family is in tension with the ideal of equal opportunity, precisely because different families will give children different head starts in life. To be clear, I’m not proposing the abolition of the nuclear family, as political philosopher John Rawls once suggested in a throwaway comment. While Rawls recognized that the nuclear family detracted from equal opportunity, he also saw that the moral development which occurs within families was crucial for citizens to develop a sense of justice which would keep liberal democracy stable.

In the family, we learn to move beyond self-interest to care about the good of others. The problem is that families may isolate us from those unlike us—religiously, racially, socioeconomically— and make it harder to care for their good because we do not understand their challenges.

How to fix this? We should start by broadening the definition of family. Why not create a new-old model that builds on the age-old notion of extended family?

Legal theorists have recently been discussing “in-between” legal family statuses. Currently, one is either a parent or a legal stranger to a child; either a legal spouse, or not. So why not create a path to recognizing the variety of relationships which reach beyond the nuclear family? For instance, “in-between” legal status for grandparents or friends of parents who help care for a child, or kinship status that allows legally recognized relationships within friend groups.

In this way, the law could encourage bonds beyond the nuclear family, and thus ease some of the burdens of isolated nuclear families. This first step could put us on the path to widening circles of trust and care, and to encouraging greater interaction within a vibrant, diverse civil society.

The post To Make Families Good for Democracy, Broaden the Notion of Family Itself appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

And while we’re on disclaimers, I should confess up front that I have none of the academic expertise seen within our universities, where thousands, possibly millions, of man-and-woman-hours have been spent dissecting the library of American television advertising to discern what it all means – “The Semiotics of Cheetos,” and so forth. But some things come through even for us amateur couch potatoes. And what these commercials say about our views on gender roles (I do believe this is the first time I’ve typed those words) wasn’t quite what I expected.

Of course, we did used to be completely sexist – no other word for it – and it’s worth getting the worst over with immediately. It’s an ad for Tab Cola in which a woman is urged to be a “mind sticker” by staying slim for her man (who’s busy at work):

Remember: he wants you with a good shape, and “keeping your shape in shape has its rewards,” when hubby decides it is time to stop working. This is some four decades old now but, if TVs had been around a little earlier, could have easily been shot in the 18th Century. The 1960s might have been seeing major changes in race relations, but changes in male-female roles were much slower to take root. The National Organization for Women wasn’t even founded until 1966.

From the same era, this ad for Goodyear Polyglas tires supposedly aired on the very first Monday Night Football telecast, in 1970. It doesn’t flat out say that women can’t drive, but that’s only because it says it in every other way.

As the 1970s unfolded, though, the change in attitudes toward women manifested itself quite rapidly. Search through YouTube ads from the second half of the decade and you’ll have a much harder time finding Tab-like offenders. Sure, there’s this “Gentlemen Prefer Hanes” (panty hose) commercial from the late 1970s:

But the mentality is still vastly different. This woman is trying to get guys, she’s going on dates, and those classy dudes like classy nylons. She’s not trying to prevent her current man from leaving her but, rather, empowering herself to feel sexy and draw attention. That’s in sharp contrast to the Tab pitch to keep “your shape in shape” (demurely, as these are not bikini-clad ads) to stick in your man’s mind.

By the 1980s, by the way, Tab cola was for both sexes. It had sass:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KzaTURy5lts&feature=related

On the other hand, for all the efforts to liberate adult women from traditional gender roles, what was happening in advertising for young girls was in many ways the opposite. Let’s turn the clock back to 1970 with an ad for Barbie that actually isn’t all that bad. It’s for the “Living Barbie”:

While we’ve seen extensive debate over whether Barbie encourages unnatural beauty standards among women, what’s striking about this ad is who sets the standards. It isn’t Barbie; it’s the little girl. (That’s Maureen McCormick, for Brady Bunch fans.) Barbie, boasts the announcer, is “acting more like a real teenager than ever before.” And the girl says, “Wow! She’s real, like me!” Barbie was improved because she was more natural.

This makes 1970 look relatively enlightened. In the years that followed, girls, unlike adult women, were being encouraged to be, if anything, less natural and more “girly” than ever. With no product was this more obvious than with children’s cosmetics, which really took off in the late 1970s. Here’s an ad (embedding disabled) for Barbie make-up from the late 70s or early 80s.

Barbie wasn’t alone in offering such products. Hasbro offered Fresh ’n Fancy. Ideal offered the Gettin’ Pretty Beauty Boutique. It was a trend. And I’d argue that it heralded the sexually precocious girl culture, the “prostitot” phenomenon, that so plagues us today. In 1981, Time magazine observed that kiddie cosmetics had caught on fire in recent years, already becoming a $100-million-a-year business.

Of course, we got wise and have abandoned all that sort of advertising, right? Wrong! Here is Barbie’s Candy Glam from 2008:

Even as women have come a long way, we’ve left young girls behind.

T.A. Frank is ideas editor of Zócalo Public Square.

*Photo courtesy of me and the sysop.

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